Reporter's Notebook

This book describes life in the 1960s, the most provocative and challenging decade of the last seventy years. Major developments in the United States and the World populated the 1960s, altering societies, politics, environments, and cultures. The Vietnam was not only changed Americans' attitudes but those of people around the globe in understanding how international economic, political, and military struggles had become complex. The race to the moon gripped the human imagination like nothing before, and it gave kids of the 1940s and 1950s a sense that science fiction was becoming reality. The civil rights movement helped partially overcome centuries long oppression of black Americans but did not solve all problems, because people, black and white are humans with good and bad characteristics. The sexual revolution changed personal, family, and societal concepts, views, and behavior in profound ways. As if those developments weren't enough, the Cuban missile crisis brought the globe close to a nuclear war and perhaps the annihilation of mankind, and in a five-year period, assassins killed a president, a presidential candidate, and the leader of the civil right movement. America's political parties altered their directions, popular music changed radically, more young people went off to college, and recreational drug use became widely accepted. The book also describes Mr. Moran's nine years as a journalist covering these developments and more.